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• Release Date: 2026-09-16T07:00:00Z
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This paper examines the rhetorical argument of the 1920 election suggesting Warren Harding was disqualified to be President because he had black ancestry. This argument prominently advanced by professor William Estabrook Chancellor is a still largely unknown controversy of the era and has ramifications to contemporary considerations of race and politics. Harding advocated for the civil rights of African Americans in the 1920 election and he and Coolidge won the state of Oklahoma where he delivered strong racial equality messages during the campaign in Oklahoma City only one year before the important Tulsa riots of 1921. Harding’s speech at Birmingham, Alabama in 1921 confronting racial segregation, is an important outgrowth of this election controversy and is included in this rhetorical study. Harding’s advocacy regarding the equality of African Americans came after the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson who promoted racial segregation of the federal workforce and showed the controversial film, “Birth of a Nation” that featured quotations from Wilson’s academic books promoting the moral value of the Ku Klux Klan. Harding’s campaign and presidential rhetoric regarding anti-blackness in America is an important but not fully understood dimension of his presidency and the roots of this controversy stem from his biography and political campaigns in Ohio.

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